As I mentioned in my previous post, the Windows Azure Mobile Services client library supports natively four data types: Boolean, strings, dates and numbers – which translated to .NET terms in the managed client, means Boolean, String, DateTime and all numeric types ([S]Byte, [U]Int[16/32/64], Double, Single, Decimal) – and their Nullable equivalent. But if we have other types which we want to use on our client, we can do it as well, by defining a class which can convert between the type and JSON (the data format used by Mobile Services when transferring data). In order to do that, we’ll need to use some classes in the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.MobileServices namespace (the MSDN documentation isn’t online yet). Let’s look at some examples on how this can be done.

First a simple scenario: we have a type with a “simple” unsupported type, such as Uri or TimeSpan, which have a fairly trivial translation to JSON (they can be represented as strings). We could also create a data transfer object (DTO) which does the conversion between the two types, but that can lead to unnecessary code bloat. What we can use instead is an implementation of the IDataMemberJsonConverter interface, which defines operations to convert to / from the JSON DOM classes in the Windows.Data.Json namespace:

public interface IDataMemberJsonConverter

{

object ConvertFromJson(IJsonValue value);

IJsonValue ConvertToJson(object instance);

}

Now in our application we’re storing movies. One of the properties we want to store is the duration of the movie, and in this case we’ll use a TimeSpan type.

public class Movie

{

public int Id { get; set; }

public string Title { get; set; }

public int ReleaseYear { get; set; }

public TimeSpan Duration { get; set; }

}

TimeSpan is not natively supported in the managed client for Mobile Services, so if we try to insert an item in the appropriate table, we’ll get the following exception:

Let me just open up a parenthesis about the Windows.Data.Json classes: I’ve worked with two previous JSON DOM libraries in the past, the System.Json classes from Silverlight (which made it to the preview stage in the ASP.NET Web API, but were later removed), and the classes in the Newtonsoft.Json.Linq from JSON.NET. Those APIs were nice, with nice features for converting between JSON and CLR objects. The Windows.Data.Json classes aren’t such an API, and we need to write more code than we did with those other two. For this simple case of converting between TimeSpan and JSON strings this is not a big problem, but once I get to more complex types, the difference will become clearer. In my projects I use a library of extension methods to make my life easier, but for completeness sake I won’t be using them in the blog posts. Closing the parenthesis.

Now, we need to tell the Mobile Services client library that we want to use our newly created converter. And we do that using the [DataMemberJsonConverterAttribute] class, decorating the property with a reference to our type:

public class Movie

{

public int Id { get; set; }

public string Title { get; set; }

public int ReleaseYear { get; set; }

[DataMemberJsonConverter(ConverterType = typeof(TimeSpanConverter))]

public TimeSpan Duration { get; set; }

}

And now we can insert unsupported types in the Mobile Services backend, as long as we can convert them to simple JSON types.

In the next post, I’ll expand on this example, to enable the usage of more complex types in the client.